Customer Reviews

Sound Advice on Mixing (Instantpro Series)

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This book is moderately helpful, if a little thin. This is not a 40-pound tome with facts and charts and cross-references that you will keep next to your mixing board; but it will get you thinking in the right direction and actually has some pretty important stuff to say about EQ, delays, limiting, and the sequence for setting up your mixes. The included CD is useful for demonstrating the effect of the techniques he is talking about, and in fact the CD is the only advantage this book has over others of its ilk. Personally, I recommend The Mixing Engineer's Handbook (Mix Pro Audio Series) by Bobby Owsinski, which is everything this book isn't.

My main beef is the price of this book in relation to the content. It is a thin book already, but it is also written in large (16 point?) type and has a LOT of white space, so it's really more of a pamphlet that was expanded into a "booklet," and it doesn't contain a ton of details about what to do with each instrument, vocals, etc. (like the Owsinsky book I recommended above). In reality, if I boiled down the useful bits from this book I could probably have told you all of them in the space of this review. So if you find it for under $5, I would say grab it. Otherwise, I would go see if I could get a copy from the local library or else just go find much of the same information online.

This book is 75 pages of large font and double spaces type. It simply does nothing to help any reader understand anything about mixing audio. It glosses over every subject. For example, mixing drums has five sentences devoted to it. This is incredibly bad. I do not recommend anybody read this even the complete novice. Bad. Bad. Bad.

I read this "book" and listened to the CD with sample mixes in about a half hour. It seems fine as a primer for a total beginner (which I am) but leaves you feeling more like you just read a magazine article than a book. It gives you a few ideas but just doesn't develop them to any depth. I haven't read the author's other works, but maybe if you slapped them all together you'd get a decent book out of it.

Once again another book which is light on true solutions.
You could find all the info within by sufting the net.
What's needed is for someone to write a book with actual facts;
ie.To match MARIAH CAREY "NEED A FRIEND",do the following;
Lead vocal 200hz q=2 g=-4db
1000hz q=2 g=-5db
5000hz q=1.4 g=3db
10000hz hi shelf g=+4db
bass etc,etc,etc
all instruments etc,etc,etc
(there should be a list of quite a few songs)
If or when someone decides to tell, the whole true and nothing but the truth,that person will sell books by the bucket load.
however this is not the book